Sara Murphy’s research and teaching interests include literature and philosophy, critical theory, feminist and gender studies, and 19th-century literary cultures. Her Gallatin courses have included “Literary and Cultural Theory;” “Sex, Gender, Nature, Culture; and Gender, Sexuality, and Self-Representation,” as well as courses in romanticism and the 19th-century and 20th-century novel. She has also taught at Rutgers, SUNY Albany, York College at the City University of New York, and NYU’s General Studies Program. Professor Murphy’s current projects include an exploration of the concept of consent in literature and political theory and a collection of essays on the representation of sexual violence in law and culture. Her work appears in such publications as Hypatia; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Philosophy & Social Criticism; Studies in Law, Politics and Society; The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History; Feminists Contest Politics and Philosophy; and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, as well as several forthcoming essay collections. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NYU Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, among others. In 2003, she received the Gallatin Adviser of Distinction Award and, in 2011, the Gallatin Excellence in Teaching Award.

Recent News

Sara Murphy’s “Inadmissible Evidence: The Trial of Madeleine Smith and Collins’s The Law and the Lady” was published in Victorian Literature and Culture 44(1), in March 2016.

Professor Murphy's essay “‘The Hereditary Taint in Her Blood:’ Madwomen, Murderesses, and Mens Rea in Sensation Fiction” appeared in the March 2014 issue of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies. Her essay “Heart, Science, and Regulation: Victorian Anti-Vivisection Discourse and the Human,” was published in Law and Literature in 2014.